Episode 387: Officer Joe Badalamente

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
You're listening to the Mike to Do Even podcast hosted
by media personality and consultant Mike Cologne. It's good to

(00:42):
see all you again. It's a been a crazy week.
Last time we saw, I think it was previous Monday.
We didn't do a show Friday because I was out
there work as shift. So it's it's great to be
back with All you Get for what will be our
only show of the week. We're not gonna do anything
the rest of the week, but you know, it's interesting
coming back now with this guest who is I was

(01:03):
telling off the air, I've known for quite a bit.
I followed his work for quite a bit, and it's
nice because we've talked about it for a while about
getting him on, and some reschedulings had to happen, but
finally he's here tonight to fill me in on what's
been kind of an interesting road for him twenty years
in the NYPD. Just as active twenty years out at
the NYPD as he was in the twenty years that
he was in it. So really just a good odyssey
to go through tonight. As is the case with usually

(01:25):
a majority, if not all, the guests that were fortunate
to have on this program, and if you missed the
previous episodes, we kind of crammed everything that we would
have had Friday into Monday as well because we did
a doubleheader. Which was the first show of the day
was for or Not Former. I keep seeing former. He's
currently he's soon to be former because he is going
to leave it in a month. Currently the New York
City Fire Commissioner. That's Robert Tucker, who was here for

(01:45):
volume seventy nine of the Best of the Bravest Interviews
with the Ft and Wise Elite. What a great guest
he was. Thanks again to Amanda Faranacci for helping set
that up. He was wonderful, enjoyed talking about the day
and of course his days in the Ft and Y,
the ins and outs of that operation today. And of
course he does leave at the end of the year,
so it's nice to get him before he departs. And
later on that evening was David Goldstein, former LAPD officer

(02:08):
originally from here who came here and subsequently joined the
NYPD in two thousand and three and carved out a
great career here after two years out in la where
he made over one hundred and fifty Arsts, so definitely
an interesting man to talk to in his own right.
And if you haven't checked out those previous two episodes,
please go do so. Hello to everybody in the chat
as always there, Sean Costello, always there, Christian Williams, same thing,

(02:30):
Joe Maliga. I'm going to work on what we talked about, Shoe.
I remember your message. Billy Ryan too. Always good to
see all of you out there supporting the program. So
a couple ads to run. I just mentioned him, so
we'll throw him on right away. And that's Billy Ryan.
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(04:19):
course you will hear from Granite State. Of course they'll
be sponsoring the Rapid Fire later on in the program,
But for now, my next guest is former New York
City Police officer whose career was anything but conventional. From
policing the winding paths of Central Park, which is one
of the more prestigious beats you can have in the department,
but when things happen, they often make the news because
it is Central Park, to writing, performing and investigating financial

(04:40):
crime after retirement. It's a compelling mix of street level
law enforcement, storytelling and creativity. So at small world. He
knows my good friend Mark to Mayo from over the years.
Of course, being on the same path in terms of entertainment.
Who says you can't wear both hats, and that's mister
Joe Bettelamante, who joins me now on the Mike the
NWAVEN podcast. Joe, like I said, we've talked about having
you on for a long time and finally you're here.

(05:02):
So it's finally great to be able to do this
with you.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Thank you very much for having me on mine.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
It's great, yoh, thanks great to have you. Thanks for
making the time. I know you're a busy guy. So
before we get into anything involving your career in the
civil service side, I guess got out a two part question. A.
Where'd you grow up in B Did you have any
family in the job that you know either from family
or TV that you wanted to do something in civil service?

Speaker 2 (05:24):
So I had no police officers that preceded me on
the job in my family. Not in the United States.
Maybe you know in Europe in the old days. But
my father was a New York City sanitation worker for
twenty years. So I have the civil service DNA. It's
in my blood. And I would say Adam twelve was
a big inspiration when I was a kid swat those

(05:47):
types of shows. Emergency. You're probably too young to remember Emergency,
but I think it's somewhere on TV Land or something
like that. It's a paramedic show.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
So yeah, so you're not the first guy to mention
that at either. So guys of a certain generation that
either end up going into the fire department or ended
up going into the police department, they either mentioned Adam
twelve or Emergency. You mentioned both, So I was I
was curious because I'm like that those two shows for
guys of a certain age had a profound impact on them,
and they're going to civil service.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
And they would throw their food away on a call.
They was going to call on Adam twelve, and they
would throw the hot dogs out the window, which I
thought was fascinating once I got on the job. Yeah,
you don't throw any food away.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
No, you put it on the dashboard if you can,
you know, in your pocket if you have to, I mean, listen.
It was kind of funny. Thankfully it didn't burst. But
we had a Priority one call here for the other day.
When I was working the ambulance and I'm driving my
partner just gotten Burger King. He places Coca Cola on
top of the dashboard. We go out to the intersection.
That bottle comes flying at me. Thankfully didn't burst. It

(06:47):
was amaericable it didn't. We were laughing about it afterwards.
But it's true. You don't throw away good food because
you don't know when your next break is going to
be in the action, so to speak. So getting on
and during that time, I mean, you came on summer
of eighty five, and obviously it's interesting from the standpoint
that growing up in New York, or at least if
you're not in the city but around the city at
that time, you really don't know where you're going to go.
Until they tell you a you can either go to

(07:09):
the city. This is ten years before the merger exactly.
You can either go housing and go transit. Now, you've
got some guys and gals that don't care. They just
want to be police officers in New York City and
they're just happy to do it. You've got some guys
and gals naturally, because either they have family in the
job or they see the NYPD, you know, the prestige
of it, that don't want anything. But so for you,
what mentality, what camp would you say you fell in?

(07:32):
Did you want the NYPD specifically or you didn't care
as well?

Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, I wanted the NYPD, and yeah I was. I
felt very grateful when I find I came up a
list of test eleven seventy five I believe, and yeah,
so I got put and I was my NSU. You
asked me where I grew up. I grew up in
Rigerald Queen's. I know. Subsequent you know, as time went
by on the job, they try to keep people zip

(07:55):
code wise not too far from where they're going to
be working. So I was in NSU eleven, which in
Brooklyn South, which was kind of weird. I wanted to
be in Brooklyn North and then after NSU eleven, I
was hoping to go to the eight three, so I
wanted to go to a heavy house, and then the
stars had different plans for me.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Well, i'll tell you just for a brief time because NSU,
I think you don't see it now because they did
away with it around the late eighties early nineties where
they went to FTU instead, which nothing against FTUFTU molded
a lot of great cops of its own right. But
NSU was really it was about a six month assignment
where you learned how to work the street and you
were with veteran I mean it's different now Now a
veteran FTO is in just it's like three or four

(08:35):
years in the job. Back then, your veteran FTO was
a veteran FTO with twenty five thirty sometimes more than
that on the job. So just from that six month
time period, what are the biggest lessons you learned and
what are the things, if anything, that stand out for
work in the street as a newbie.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah, we were lucky because we had Tommy Doyle who
is famous and I know Billy Ryan from back then.
Billy Ryan and I were in the same I think
he was six months where yere ahead of me, but
I remember meeting him and he also did stand up
so early. Yeah, we knew each other a little bit
from NSU and then from the clubs. But again he
was ahead of me a bit. But we had Tommy Doyle,

(09:11):
I think, who had probably thirty thirty five years on
the job. And even though we were in NSU eleven,
which was Park Slope, we were stationed in the h
what station house to seven eight seven eight station house
on Flappers Avenue I believe it is, And but they
would fly us to Coney Island once April came around
March April. We got there in December and it was

(09:31):
just so cold that winter, and so you know that's
a CoP's best friend, right, is the weather. So once
they started flying us down at Coney Island, it was
you know, all bets were off, you know, lots of
lots of fights, lots of lots of action coming at us.
We were posted all over the boardwalk or all over
the astroland and you learned a lot there just about

(09:52):
proud mentality dealing with people, which actually helped me a
lot when I got to Central Park, even though it's
a different it's a totally different atmosphere, but still dealing
with tons of people in huge crowd situations.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
You know, rather you like the guy or not. Mayor
Dinkins had a quote. The late Mayor Dinkins had a
quote where he described New York City as a cultural mosaic.
You know, it really is a melting pot. I don't
think there's a better representation of that when you're working
specifically in Manhattan and when you're working specifically in Central Park,
because everybody's coming through, people from the city, people who
live in the area, you got your tourists, you got

(10:25):
people from all over the country, all over the world
since that's one of the main attractions, one of the
main landmarks, that want to go through and see it
and kind of you know, again, they always say it
for any New York City cop or New York City firefighter,
you have backstage past the greatest show on Earth. I
don't think there's a better example than walking and be
in Central Park because you see everything incredible.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
You'll be many times I'd be helping the homeless person out,
trying to get him to go to the hospital or
something like that, and then Sting walks by and you're
talking to a homeless guy. One second you're talking to Sting,
and then someone's asking for directions to the met Museum.
It's a diff It's a different busy in the park, right.
And then, like you said earlier in the intro, nothing happens.
And then when something happens, you're on the front page

(11:05):
or the daily news for making a mistake. When there
was a front page. Now you'd be on drudge, you know,
if you made a bad enough mistake. So, yeah, it
was it was like being on the stage. Right. If
the city is the stage, Central Park is front and center,
you know, because you just never know what could go
wrong or right at any second.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
Right, and there are days when it can be cushy
because it's a quiet day, you know, and listen, there's
plenty of days and especially during a nice summer day
in the city, nothing's happening. Guys are just going through,
even the homeless people that are there, they're not bothering anybody.
They're just going about their business. It's a great assignment
to have, but when it hits the fan, it hits
the fan. You know. You can have a robbery in there.
You could have somebody that's running away from the cops
in another area cuts through Central Park to try to hide.

(11:47):
All of a sudden, they put it over the radio.
You know.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Happened all the time.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Ye hyeah.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
And at one point we had the same frequency. We
were on the same division as the two to zero
to the west and the nineteen to the east. But
at some point they changed itnineteenth was no longer on
our frequency. I believe somebody could correct me in the comments,
but I think that's what it was. And then that
would happen even more often because you had no idea
what was going on, and that happens to commands all
over the city. Obviously. When I was in NSU in

(12:14):
the seven, I was in the six seven one night
and the seven L was right next door, and I
think that's a different division, and I had I had
a month on the street, and I had these guys
running towards me. I had no idea what was going on.
But you just learned that thing quickly. For that reason,
be flexible.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
You got there kind of around the time, you know,
literally a few days before one of the most notorious
incidents in NYPD history, really New York City history when
Stephen McDonald detective Steve McDonald was shot and although he
became such an inspiration and there was a silver lining
to it in terms of his example of being a
man of forgiveness and all the good he was able
to do. Certainly I came to know of him just

(12:51):
being a New York Ranger fan and how active and
rabbit he was as a Ranger fan, as is his son,
who's I believe a lieutenant on the job now. But
being there around such a heavy time where originally people
thought he was going to die when he was shollowed, Yeah,
it did not look good at all. And this was
a time when cops were getting killed in the city.
Didn't matter what tat patch you were, transit housing or
city cops were getting hurt and killed in a lot

(13:13):
of doing. The city left it right. It was a
very violent time. What was it like to be there
during such a heavy time or not only is it
heavy enough with a cop getting shot, but look at
where you're working, like we talked about.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Well, I got to meet Stephen before I was assigned
to Central Park because the story I've always told about
a month before that the orders came down. I believe
I got transferred there on July fifth. I remember that
was the centennial celebration for the Statue of Liberty that summer,
and that's what led it was building all winter spring
directly to that celebration, four or five day big event.

(13:46):
And so the orders must have come down around June thirtieth,
and we had been to the we we're flown from
Brooklyn to Central Park Precinct, probably June tenth, June fifteenth,
and I remember walking across the Great Lawn. It was
for a philharmonic in the park or a ballet that
they set up the stage on the Great Lawn, you know,

(14:06):
fifty thousand people. And it was before the Central Park
Conservancy really took over the park. So the Great Lawn
was a dust bowl, that's all it was. There was
very little grass, and the wind was blowing and it
was dirt on our uniforms. And I turned to one
of my buddies, Joe Tarbobono, and I said, can you
imagine actually being assigned to this place? And then two

(14:27):
weeks later the orders came down and I was assigned
to that place. But they introduced us to Stephen and
the other anti crime guys that night and said, listen,
these guys are going to be out and about. Don't
shoot them. And I'll never forget that. And so when
I got to the park, I believe Stephen was shot
on July twelfth of eighty six. I hope I didn't
get the day wrong. And my family was kind of
relieved that I had been assigned to Central Park because

(14:49):
even though it was the eighties and it was not
what it is now, it was still it was known
to be a slower place. And then Stephen got shot,
so it was it was just a for everyone. Anything
could happen anywhere at any.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Time, right, and you never want to assume either. And
he was July twelfth. Through you are right on the date.
He was shot July twelfth, and he ended up dying
from those injuries, and he was classified naturally he's a
line of duty death on January tenth of twenty seventeenth.
So I mean again, it's kind of like kind of
Detective Islam, right, Detective Islam recently who was gunned down

(15:23):
in the line of duty in July. Here he was
and I said this at the time, a couple of
friends of mine after he was shot and killed. He
was working in one of the most dangerous precincts in
the city of the South. Bronx doesn't get hurt at
all in three or four years out there is working
in extra security detail in full uniform in midtown Manhattan
in a posh building and gets killed doing that. So
you just can never predict to your point when it's

(15:45):
gonna happen, right, you know, the danger just seems to
unfortunately find guys, and you know, and found Detective MacDonald
that day his I mean again, and I'm glad, even
though I wish it didn't happen in the first place,
he forgave the man, and that man unfortunately ended up
getting killed at a motorcycle accident three days after get
out of prison.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
He was always released. Yeah, I want to say, would
you say ninety five?

Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yeah, ninety five, Yeah, that's what I.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Woul I would have said ninety six. But yeah, forget
his name now, but yeah, yeah. Stephen was a remarkable man.
I got to know him pretty well in the park.
He would always show up at our parties and got
to talk to him quite a bit. He would come
to the priests and often to visit. Just a remarkable person.
Absolutely faith m.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
He absolutely did, and he's not forgotten and he never
will be. In terms of just policing the beat, you
mentioned some of the people that you would encounter rather
be celebrities like Sting. I forgot around this time when
he split from the police. He was living in Manhattan
at the time, and I really enjoy that man's music,
so I'm glad you mentioned him. And of course just
helping average folk. What are some of the notable encounters
in terms of making arrest or just even being able

(16:44):
to help somebody if it was not arrest matter that
you were able to do early on during that time.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Oh, encounters. I mean, so in eighty six, when Jennifer
Levin was killed, I was the officer assigned to sit
with Robert Chambers in the captain's office. I had been
out sick the night before, and on the midnights, which
you go administrative sick, you only get one tour. So
I came back in the next night and the desk
lieutenant or sergeant said, don't bother putting on the whole uniform,

(17:12):
just going into the cop put on your shirt and
pants and go into the captain's office. You're going to
be guarding the prisoner. So that's what I did. And
then whenever they moved him that night, the homicide guys,
they took me with them. So I was the uniform
with the purp walk coming out. And somewhere there has
to be video because they played it for the first
ten years on the news. Whenever he was mentioned, you

(17:33):
had the two detectives walking chambers up the steps of
the old priestint and then a chubby, little young cop
with a mustache walking up alongside with the old baseball
cap with the cap device on the baseball cap. And
that was me, and I would get phone calls I
just saw you in the news last night. I was
his escort. And then thirty years later, I'm assigned to
the Central Park suit and not assigned. One of my

(17:54):
jobs post NYPD was a security manager at the Central
Park Zoo, assistant security man, assistant to the manager. And
I met a woman there that worked there, a photographer,
and she was telling me she lift off one day
and I asked her what was wrong. She said, today's
the thirtieth anniversary of my niece being killed. So I

(18:15):
inquired further and it turned out that Jennifer Levin was
her niece.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
It was craizy coincidence, absolutely, and you were telling me
that off the air, and it's kind of sobering, because,
I mean, a killer is a killer is a killer.
There's no rhyme or reason in terms of how they're
going to look like and how they're going to present.
But naturally, the mind goes to certain places. And when
you look at the brutality the crime surrounding Jennifer's, you know,
the circuses surrounding her murder, one would think, and one

(18:39):
would naturally because this is what our brains do. It's
the cognitive bias within us. You make a mental image
in your head of what the killer would look like.
You're thinking maybe some homeless person, someone some thud from
off the street. Now Robert Chambers was anything, but they
called him the preppy Killer for a reason. He was like,
if you think about cut and dry meat and potatoes,
milk toast, college kids, rich kids, Wall Street kids of

(19:01):
that era. He fit the bill to a t. And
I think that's unfortunately one of the things because this
is how things are done, especially in the age of
the paparazzi, and especially here in the States where when
it's a killer who looks like that when it's an
unconventional suspect that you wouldn't normally picture doing something like this.
It attracted so much attention that people almost I mean
not those who were involved in the investigation, certainly not

(19:23):
her family and friends. People almost stopped focusing so much
on what he did to Jennifer Levin started focusing more
on him, which I thought was disgraceful. Oh.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Absolutely, And he was so handsome. You walked in, I
walked into the office, It looked like a young Elvis. Yeah, yeah,
that's what he was, very tall, everything. But he was
so out of it. Because one of the times I
had I was there for hours with him, I had
to leave to use the restroom, so I had to
call someone to relieve me. And when I came out,
I saw that how much press was waiting in the

(19:51):
causeway there in the old precinct in the central Park
Pasent where people would cars would pull out. And when
I came back in, I said, man, there's a lot
of pre us out there, And he said, when we leave,
can we leave through a different entrance or exit? Because
I don't want anyonet to know about this. That's how
out of it. He was like he didn't even realize
what was going on and how much trouble he was in.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, and to begain sentenced for that. He's out, as
you told me. Now he's out, and he did pay
his debt technically, although is it ever really paid when
you do something like that.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
He got arrested a second time for drugs, for hell,
and they got him good too, And I think he
did another four or five years for that. But now
he's out. He's living upstate New York somewhere. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Well, well, so hope he keeps his nose clean for
his sake and more importantly, for the community's sake, because that,
like I said, it was about as barbaric as it
possibly would have gotten. You know, just get back to
your career. I know you wanted originally a busy house.
Who doesn't right unless you're taking the job and there
are people like this unfortunately. I want to go somewhere
slow and just collect the check. Most normal people who
get on the job get into it for the right reasons.

(20:51):
You want to go somewhere busy, not because you like
to see people of distress, but you know you're going
to learn a lot by working the street, and you
know you're going to get a lot of chances to
help people. Not to say you couldn't do that in
Central Park, but the young mind is the young mind.
So at what point you know, again you kind of
mentioned earlier when you were talking with your buddy, imagine
being assigned to a place like this. Did you say
to yourself, you know what, I may not have gotten
a busy precinct from the standpoint of a lot of

(21:12):
crime or gun collers, but this is something I can
really make into my own.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
I guess I was so young. I was twenty one
years old, so when I got assigned to the park, yeah,
just twenty one by birthdays in March and this was July.
And I guess it just gradually you'd start making friends
and you just start to get comfortable. That's really all
I can say. But within two three years I was
chosen to be the highway safety guy. So now here

(21:39):
I am at twenty three years old. I have Saturdays
and Sundays off, steady days, and it's a job that
intimidated me for the first month, and then after about
a month I realized, oh, this is pretty easy. So
unfortunately it's just being comfortable. But it was right around
then when I started to really get the itch to
do stand up. And that's when I met my wife
and she would not let me me let that go,

(22:01):
so she would have constantly pushing me. So it was
the idea of okay, now what do I do do
I leave Central Park and what I know now when
I have this other thing I'm doing. But I did
do over my years in Central Park. I did do
everything you could possibly do in the park. I was
in snow, I was in I was a highway safety officer,

(22:22):
I was in CPU CPOP did patrol. Did you know?
I did everything? So I use the park for what
it's for, like what you can get out of it.
I definitely got everything out of it that you could
possibly get. So answer your.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Question, it does, and I'll hit on a couple of
things that you were able to do within them before
of course getting to stand up and all the other
endeavors outside of the uniform. So highway safety is interesting
for me because I know there is a road or
maybe even two that cut through the park, people cars
can come through. Is that what you're referring to for
highway safety in the park.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
So highway safety is just I don't know if it
still is. It probably is. It's the person's in charge
of making sure the accident reports, summons is broken down,
making sure everything flows upwards to where it has to go.
Central Park has a six mile loop around the inside
of the park. There are four transverse roads sixty fifth,
seventy nine to eighty six and ninety six. That's the

(23:14):
traffic that just goes from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West.
To keep traffic flowing, you don't actually go, you're cutting
through the park and homestead and law. The guys who
designed Central Park, they sunk them down so that way,
even back then in the eighteen sixties, the horse and
the horse and carriage traffic wouldn't. You can be standing
right next to a transverse road in the park and

(23:35):
just because of the way it's designed, you don't really
hear it unless attractor trailer happens to go by, or
a truck something loud of bus. It's an amazing place,
it really is. So that the highway safety officer job
back then at least was breaking down the summons is,
making sure they went to their respective departments, criminal court, parking,
the accent reports, making sure and then every month you'd

(23:56):
have to or every two months, go to a meeting
at the Burrow, an accident or review meeting, give your opinion,
even though it didn't matter at all because the chief
would have always made up his mind of what they
were going to do to the cop who had the accident.
So yeah, from my memory, again we're talking about nineteen
eighty eight to nineteen ninety a. D that's what my

(24:17):
that's what my assignment was in.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
The park Man, you know, And again that is a
situation where again, you know, there's a lot that you
can squeeze out of it, and ultimately it's what you
make of it, because it's all an education at the
end of the day. And that's a nice thing about
working in the New York City Police Department. That is,
specifically speaking, each assignment teaches you something and it doesn't
always have to be those crazy calls, although they'll certainly

(24:39):
teach you a lot after the fact. It's just day
to day and I think that plays perfectly in the
truancy and Seapop. Bratton was big into that. I mean
this preceded him too, but he really kind of invested
into that in his own right to a degree. Kelly
did too in his first Innis Commissioner, where you know,
let's get the cops out of the cars, which Central
Park cops were already doing. So you probably laugh when
you saw Seapop going through. I was like, this is

(25:00):
kind of our beat every day. The rest of the
city just caught on. But in terms of the youth too,
truancy was a big things back then, and you saw
a lot of kids, of course, especially as the crack
era commenced, have a lot of temptation to go down
the wrong route, and with crack comes what the possibility
of being into gangs as well. Even if they're not
doing that, they just don't like school. They just don't
know what they want to do with their lives, and
they're just frustrated. You know how many eighties and nineties

(25:21):
and two thousand movie plots were just kids being lost
trying to find their way. You saw that in real life.
So just tell me about with truancy, trying to do
your part to just guide them back on the right
track and whatever way you could.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
So truancy for me was I was a filling guy
because you know, I guess they were kind of attached
to community police, and so I did truancy plenty, and
you're right, You're exactly right. Most of the time, the
park is just a place that's known for kids to
go to hang out, right if the weather's nice, to
them to skip school and go in. So I did

(25:53):
it often filling in for somebody who was out sick
on vacation. And we would ride around in an unmarked
white then and grab some kids when we saw them
and then take them down to uh was Commercial High School.
It was called something like that, Uh, But yeah, it was.
It was an interesting experience because occasionally you'd run into

(26:14):
a kid who was troubled, very troubled, and then would
have to, you know, contact the right departments within the
city to try to get some help for that child.
And I didn't have children at the time, so I
could only imagine having kids now, having my daughters are
in their twenties, having to deal with that. It must
hit a lot harder. It would have landed a lot

(26:34):
harder than it did.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Absolutely no, you know. And again even then, you kind
of see a little bit of yourself, even if you
didn't have the struggles.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
That they did, you know, it was that much older
than them. Right, ten years older at the time, you know, and.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Maybe that helps the relatability too. It's a little bit
different than you and I'm not not going to they
can have an impact too, But a forty five fifty
five year old cop talking to you versus someone who
is not that far moved from where you are right now,
the relatability factor changed a little bit.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Well, that happened to me, I know, as I write
for Police one, the website Police one. Last September, I
did an article about my daughter Kiara, who works at
Barish McGarry Barish McGarry, I don't want to mispronounce it.
She's a team leader there and I wrote an article
about her working there and me having been a cop.
And I got a call from the editor about a

(27:20):
week after the story dropped and a professor at a
college in Wisconsin wanted to speak to me. Well, it
turns out when he was at seventeen or eighteen years old,
him and his friends from the Catholic high school that's
on Madison Avenue. It's the number one Catholic high school
in the city. I can't believe I'm blanking on it.
You stand by, Yeah, yeah, I'm sure someone will put

(27:40):
it on the thing. But they were drinking up on
top by the precinct, and I pulled up in my
scooter to support in him. I do have a vague
memory after I spoke to him, and they had a
case of beer under the bench, and I made sure
that none of them were driving. They told me where
they went to school. The panic on these kids' faces

(28:01):
because they were just about to graduate. So if I
had taken them in and wrote the Vietnam summons, is
they weren't going to graduate. They weren't going to at
least they weren't going to walk or whatever. So thirty
something years later, I find out that an action I
took because I could relate to what the kids were
doing and followed the spirit of the law and not
the letter of the law. They didn't get in trouble.

(28:23):
And the guy, the professor, has used that story every
semester since he became a teacher, a college teacher teach
him about how regis Regius.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
Yeah, Jimmy Shanahan, who's been on the show before, Thank you,
thank you, Jimmy Hills, Well with you the.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Best, thanks James. So yeah, Regis high School. So yeah,
it's the relatability factor because the year it happened, I
was twenty seven, so I was only ten years older
than those kids.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, you know, and then again it's it's one of
those things where they never forgot that, you know again,
and that it speaks to a lost art I feel
in policing because of how things are now, which is
a different story for a different day. But nevertheless, guys
including Jimmy, you know, a police during that era, talk
about it. Discretion. Discretion doesn't exist that much now, or
at least the room to utilize it because of a

(29:10):
combination of things, cops being scared to get jammed up
and just the way the laws are now that back then,
I mean, listen, if it was something that had to
be addressed, they needed to be addressed. But it didn't
always have to be an absolute you know, there wasn't
that much of an absolutist mindset back then, where you know, what,
he needs to go to jail or she needs to
go to jail. You know, sometimes it allowed you to heay, listen,

(29:30):
don't do that again. There has to be some consequences
for it, but that doesn't have to end with you
being in handcuffs and that goes a longer ways sometimes.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
And it didn't hurt that. It was probably ten minutes
before they ended tour and I was looking to go home,
so I didn't want to get involved, especially with the
other guys. Well, one of the kids went back to
the school very drunk and got them all in trouble anyway,
but it wasn't as bad a trouble as if a
police officer had taken them in that so that's why
he remembers it very fondly.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Oh and there you go, and there you go. So
I guess that kind of segues into now pursuing it
of course, meaning you're endeavors outside of the uniform stand up.
You have to have a second outlet because the job
can be demanding and draining. It doesn't matter where you work,
and it doesn't matter like you said before, I've talked
to plenty of cops en firement on the show. Even
though it's different jobs, you're seeing the same rough stuff,
or even just if it's not rough, right, even if

(30:18):
it's the days aren't bad, they're just long. You're always
on your feet, and it's good to have Abby's to
make you forget about work no matter what you do,
even if you have nothing to do with the emergency
response field. So where did the interest in comedy and
the ability or the desire at the very least to
reword that to get on stage start.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
I was always a class clown. Always. My mom was
a big Cars Johnny Carson fan, so I grew up
watching the Tonight Show. My dad would be working four
to twelve shift or the midnight shift in sanitation department,
so she would let me stay up with her because
I guess she was lonely, and I watched Johnny Carson.
So at my earliest memories I could remember the music,
I remember the show, and then very young, I had

(30:55):
a cousin I still have a cousin who turned me
on to George Carlin and Bill Cosby and Richard Prior.
So I was eight, nine, ten years old listening to
their albums and still, despite mister Cosmy's many problems, still
one of the greatest comics of all time. And George
Carlin and Richard Pryor, I think are neck and neck
for that title. So this is what I grew up

(31:15):
listening to. And you know, I have a friend. I
grew up with a guy who was an actor, and
he used to encourage me, you know, you really should
do it, you should get on stage. I had no
idea how to do it. And then Jimmy Fanning, who
was the community Community Affairs officer at the Central Park Precinct,
he overheard me one day and he said, you know,
there's a guy involved with the conservancy, the Central Park Conservancy.

(31:39):
He has something to do with stand up. And that
guy's name is Andy Engel. Still a good friend, and
he was the one who first gave me a list
of open mic nights. So in nineteen ninety one I
signed up for an open mic and I had done
Governors on Long Island first. I had gone out there
because I lived in Queens and went out and did
a few minutes. I'm not sure i'd met Billy Ryan

(32:00):
if it was there or later on in Manhattan. But
the Manhattan thing was my wife would not let my
dream go and I would always try to think of
excuses not to go up on stage, and never really
suffered from horrible stage fright. I had it, but nothing horrible,
so that wasn't too much of an impediment. It was
just this commitment thing of like I must have felt

(32:21):
somehow that it was an important step and I was
afraid of it. I don't know what it was. As
a matter of fact, when I first met Jimmy Shanahan,
I had been doing stand up for about five years,
and if there was ever a person born more natural
to be up in stage in front of people, it's Jimmy.
And I actually walked up to him after the show,
after the show, look at that after the Borough based
training event that I was at, and I said, dude,

(32:42):
do you do stand up? And he said, oh, brother,
thank you so much. I'd really like to do it.
I mean, it's not over, James, it's not over. We're
going to get you up there one day. So I
hope I answered the question why because it was always
pretty easy for me to make a room full of
people left and sound that sound of approved laughter. And
I've read a lot of comics talk about that and

(33:03):
interviews that it was just that wave of laughter that
hits you, that just feels so good. It's approval.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
Yeah, it's a high. It really is, for lack of
a better way to word, it's a high. And that's
you know, that's the thing too. What's one of the
coping mechanisms for just in general. You know, he's getting
through work levity laughter, you know, so that's one of
the key things. And you had that and that's imperative too.
And I will ask you too, were you the type
of guy to prepare because everybody's different some guys. I mean,

(33:29):
he's not necessarily a comic, But I love watching Henry
Rollins a Spoken Word Specials because it doesn't seem like
he has any material prepared. He just kind of has
these stories from traveling around the world and he just
goes up there and just wings it for the most part.
Where you type got a winger, did you have material prepped?

Speaker 2 (33:45):
I I'm not that familiar with mister Rollins, but I
would have to call suspicion on anything where it looks
like someone's winning it, because comics may win a joke
here and there on stage, and that's why they record
themselves because something might come up up in the middle.
But you're fully prepared and rehearsed. When you go on stage.

(34:06):
You may be looking to try out some new material
that you would squeeze in between tried material because it's
a scary place to be up there with that silence. Yeah,
so prepared always prepared even if I couldn't get on stage.
There's a ten minute set of me on YouTube from
Caroline's in June of nineteen ninety seven. It was the

(34:27):
Toyota Comedy Festival, and my daughter Kiara was only born
two months before that, so I really couldn't get on stage,
but I was invited to the festival, so I would
just when my wife would go to sleep with the baby,
I would just stay up and rehearse the set. I
literally would, and I had taken acting lesson so there
was a big part of acting involved with that as well.
I would just memorize the set so well that even

(34:50):
without having tried the material had been tried out at
other venues prior to this time, so I knew that
most of that ten minutes would work. But people can
watch it on YouTube and let me know what they
But excuse me. Yeah, most comics I don't think are
winning it. Maybe at an open mic night or something
like that, but if you're going on a show where
you're getting paid, not a lot of winning going on.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Well, listen, we have a little bit of the special.
It's ten minutes long, so we won't play the whole thing,
but we we do have it here on YouTube. Let's
watch a little bit of it Joe bade LaMonte Live
the Carolines in nineteenninety seven.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
I can't hear it.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
You.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Let's stand by.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Look at the hair.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
Volume is maxed out.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
M well, I mean I borrowed the jacket from Fred Gwynn.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
The audience put it in the chat. If you can
hear it. If not, I'll stop playing it. I don't,
but we do. At least you can just type it
in on YouTube. So let me know if you guys
can hear it. Okay, no volume? All right? Yeah, yeah,
sorry about that, folks. I thought there would be some
volume on that, but nevertheless, yes. So I mean, I mean,
by that point, you've been doing it for six years,

(36:09):
so you're kind of comfortable. The nerves never fully go away,
but you've been doing it for a little bit. So
let's go back a second. When you went on the
first time, you know, you remember doing it, talk about
I guess, kind of gaining the audience's trust in battling
through even though you never said you were a big
stage fright guy, battling through whatever nerves existed.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
My problem was, would stand up is that I did
well so quickly in the beginning that when it came
time to when an audience. I'll give you a perfect example.
I was at Caroline's another time and I killed what
they called killed, and a woman came up and said, look,
I have a room in western Pennsylvania. I would love
you to do it. It's a long ride. It's all

(36:49):
the way at the bottom, you know what they call
pennsyl Tucky the bottom seth.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
And I was I was so flattered. I was so
blown away. I was like sure, and I took the bid.
My wife and I went out and I spoke for
ten and I say spoke, because no one left for
ten minutes. And I didn't. I didn't know what to do, Mike.
I did not know what to do because that hadn't
happened to me before. And I was so petrified of

(37:14):
what's called crowd work, where you speak to the audience.
What do you do where you're from? Now I can
do that, you know, at my age, at sixty, I
could do that. I would not be afraid at all
to do it because I would have some reference of
anything that anyone says what they do for a living.
But at twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine years old.
I just didn't have the confidence. So when nobody was

(37:35):
laughing at these jokes that people in Manhattan were dying
laughing with, I literally didn't know what to do. And
my wife was with the headliner in the back of
the room, and the headliner kept going, Oh, this is
good stuff. They're just not getting it, which made me
feel a lot better, you know.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
Right, Well, sometimes you know, it depends on who your
audience is. And I'm not criticizing the audience.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
No nobody else. Yeah, but I was my responsibility to pivot,
and I couldn't pivot as far as the first time,
I mean open mics from the first time I got
serious about it. In October of nineteen ninety one, I
was in Colorado on vacatience and I and I had
a dream that Jay Lena was standing by the curtain
and the Tonight show and the music was playing and

(38:13):
he said follow me, and I woke up. I go, okay,
I guess that's a sign. So the next week I
showed up at the New York Comedy Club. And so
that was roughly October fifth of ninety one, and in January,
the owner of the club sent me on a paid
al Martin who just recently passed, and yeah, so it
was too fast, too quick, and I auditioned for the

(38:35):
comic strip that June. I passed the first level and
then I didn't get into the second level because the
owner of the club said he already had a big
Italian guy in his stable, so he didn't need another
big Italian guy, which was Richie Franchaise, who actually ended
up on SNL for a brief time, who I see
at Gotham a lot now. But it was my fault.

(38:55):
I was afraid of success. I tell you that now clearly,
but at that age I wouldn't have any idea what
it was. I was, why I was holding back, Why
I was you know, obviously I was. I was doing well.
People liked me, the crowds liked me. I didn't really
ever have a problem with any of the crowds. But
I didn't want it. I didn't want it. Like again

(39:17):
a hair reference, you have to want it like your
hair is on fire and you want water. That's how
you have to want that world. Because that is of
all the arts, and I have respect for all types
of artists. Stand up you are the writer, actor, director,
produce your everything, and to be up on that stage
alone like that, and because the rejection is going to
come no matter what, like I did with myself, and

(39:39):
you have to be ready to push through that. And
that's my advice to any young person who's looking to
do it. And now I've worked at Gotham doing security
on an off for years and really really getting to
watch people that from New Comics Solo to Jerry Seinfeld
who's there all the time, and it's really a craft, really,
and truly.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
It's truly an art form because you know it's it's
the loneliest even if you're doing well, it's the loneliest
feeling in the world. It's like walking a tightrope and
it can go either way. You do it right, you
walk that tyrope, get to the other side. You take
one wrong step, well, we know what's gonna happen. And
audiences at sometimes it depends on where you are, can
be very very unforgiving what I did like and Joe Malika,
I see your question. I'll get to it in the moment.

(40:19):
Is with Carolines, at least back then, I'm not sure
how it is now. There's a lot of range in
terms of who you could see up there because for example,
I mean they had somebody like you who what was
your day job being a New York City police officer.
There's a stand up special from nineteen ninety nine where
you would have never guessed like Al Sapienza, very good actor,
who if you ever if? For those of you who
are fans of the show The Sopranos, he played Mikey

(40:39):
Palmisi in season one. He played a very brutal killer
mobster on that show in season one, although his character
was written comedically to some extents, and there he is
after playing a guy like that on a show like that,
to doing stand up at Carolines so you could see
anybody on the stage. So to be able to get
up on the stage with people who were doing that
in terms of their data jobs and made it all

(41:01):
the more impressive. Like you said, people really did like you.
And that's a testament to that.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
It's just it's just the luck of you know something
about you that they like. It's not you can't take
credit for it. It's not like right, you're not doing
right and being yourself. That's what stand up a lot
and I think acting as well. I studied acting is
stripping away the bs and becoming who you really are.
Like I hear sometimes people criticize an actor he's the

(41:27):
same in every role. But that's you can't not be
who you are. That's talking about doing an impression, right,
But acting is, or stand up or anything any any art.
For him, it's it's really learning more who you are
and letting that shine through. Absolutely easy to say thirty
years on again, I wouldn't been able to say that
when I was twenty eight.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
But it comes with time and experience. And Joe Maleiga's
questioned the chat really quick is as far as crowd
work is concerned, something that you've come to do later,
what was your ideal victim in the crowd victim?

Speaker 2 (41:56):
I mean no, I actually never really learned to do
crowd work. Unfortunately. I did stand up for about a
good ten year period of time, and I never really
had to because the MC's job was to do the
crowd work usually and victim I would have Again, it's
it's anybody who's willing to speak to you, right, so heckling.

(42:17):
Heckling's not actually allowed at Gotham and other clubs in
the city, it's immediately squashed. But anybody who's willing to
talk would be And not to use the word victim,
but to use someone useful because if they're going to
give you information, you can play on it. So you
know that would be the answer to that.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Something tells me know this person that Chad Dana Bottle
of Men favorite comedian.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
Doun's familiar. Oh I said it earlier. Dana's my younger daughter.
George Carlin for sure number one. Prior, very close. Richard
My god, my mind just totally slipped on him much more,
No prior. I love too. But going down is from
the Bronx, a Jewish Bronx comedian.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
I know you're talking about. I can't think of the name.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
He met him a couple of times. Really good guy.
There's so many, there's so many, but Carlin is the
one I can relate to the most and speak in
a central park. I met him twice there in the park,
and then another time my wife at my thirtieth birthday.
My wife took him to see it. Took me to
see him in Englewood, New Jersey, at the theater there,
and I took my VHS copy of one of my

(43:25):
Caroline sets and I brought it and I spoke to
one of the security guys and he goes, hold on
one second, and he went and got George Carlin and
brought him out, and Carlin told me to take a
walk with him, and I took a walk with him
and I gave him my video. I said, I'm not
looking for work. I just wanted to say, you know,
you're one of my heroes and thank you so much.
And he said, don't have heroes. They'll disappoint you every time.

(43:47):
Role models are okay, but don't have heroes. I'll never
forget it. And then he called me a month later
and left the message on my answer machine that he
had watched the video. Keep doing it, You're good, amazing,
just amazing. Wow.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
And he was a very I mean his comment and
not knocking it. I'm just saying he kind of blended
social commentary with his comedy, which worked for him. He
could do that. Not everybody could walk that, Tyroe. He
walked it perfectly, and he was great, especially at the
post nine to eleven landscape. He was really able to tap
into a lot of major issues going on at the
time but make it humorous. You know, serious commentary with
add humor to it. He's missed, man, I mean there

(44:21):
were He truly was one of one.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
I love to hear what he would think of social media.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
He passed, Oh god, two thousand and eight.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
He died a cancer only seventy one, I think seventy two,
but it abused himself for a long time, right, Yeah,
but I would love to hear his take on everything
that's been going on for the last ten fifteen years.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
The underrated thing with him is that could he work
a blue Yes, But at the same time, if put
in certain circumstances, even if he didn't have to work
blue and had to kind of be forced to keep
it cleaner by nature, he was still able to be
just as hilarious.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
I don't know if it's on YouTube still, but years
ago I saw it on YouTube. He made a guest
to Pere and Son because I'm a child at WFN
back when Imus in the Morning another legend, the late
Great don Imus was on Wfans in the Mornings and
he had Carlin Studio. This is about nineteen ninety eight
when Imus just started simulcasting at MSNBC. Carlin's in there
for about ten minutes. I miss just laughing so hard.
He's crying, you know. They him, Charles McCord, Bernard, all

(45:18):
those guys who are pretty funny in their own right.
They're holding their sides from how hard they're laughing. And
Carlin doesn't swear once. There's no really dirty jokes in there.
He's not working blue, but he's still just as funny,
you know, And that's a testament to his skill set
and any comedian skill set they could have that. Yeah,
So for me, that kind of leads us into, you know,
the one man show between nineteen ninety nine and two

(45:38):
thousand and one, Shades of Blue. Now by this point
it's fourteen fifteen years in the job, So before we
even kind of dive into Shades of Blue, which was
like a one man act, how soon did you start
to incorporate bits of your day job into your act
or was that something that you decided to dive into.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Finally right away? Yeah? Early stand up. Yeah, I talked
about being the cop, and I had several bits about
being a police officer in New York City, and I
couldn't even imagine doing it now because half the audience immediately,
So I wouldn't even try it. But back then it
was different. And so the Shades of Blue, which became

(46:15):
the Central Park Zoo ironically because I ended up working
at the Zoo after you when I retired, was basically
I have to give a lot of credit to John
Lebozamo because going to see his one person shows Mambo
Mouth and I can't remember some of the names of
the other ones, but just the idea of getting up
there and playing different characters. And then a childhood friend

(46:36):
of mine had done a one person show. He's an
actor that people will know, ron El Dart. We grew
up together, probably most known for Blackhawk Down TV show
called Yeah. We were very close when we were young,
and he did a one man show called Standing eight
count and where he played eight different characters. So those
two things inspired me. And then John Doresta, John Doresta's.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
Former trans that got up Yeah, we did.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Stand up together. We met very early on in January
of ninety three at the New York's Funniest Cop competition
at Stand Up New York. I won Go No. I
won the first show, Oh you did? John won the
second show, and then that was it. So he got
the title of New York's Funniest Cop and went on,
but I got it. John, it deserves all the credit
in the world because he has worked so hard for

(47:22):
the last twenty five thirty years, just constantly he has
he knows exactly what set he's on, Like he can
tell you this is my three thousand set. I could
never I never had that kind of focus the way
he has. I lost my train of thought, though, what
was the question.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
About incorporating aspects of your act?

Speaker 2 (47:43):
So the one man show kind of came naturally from
that idea of watching. That was the last thing I'd
seen was John's beat, a Subway cops comedy where but
he was himself on stage most of the time. His
was more stand up than it was character. Mine was
literally my life flashes before your eyes. So it starts

(48:03):
off with my father telling me why I should be
a cop. It was my dad's big push for me
to do it, and then literally changing to lieutenant freelings
Off was a lieutenant the police accounted with a big
handlebar mustache with a shiny head and mine telling us
how lucky we were to be in New York City
police officers, and which I really felt the whole time,

(48:24):
and then all the way through just characters in Central Park,
and it was it was pretty good. I have to
admit I can admit it without being prideful. That was
the one man show. Got great reactions from people. People
really seem to enjoy it. Good well.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
Aunt zero two in the chat, I don't know his
exact name, but he's putting me on the spot or
sheet because they're saying, do the dead body bit.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Dead body bit, need a little more information.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Put a little more information in the chat. Maybe we
can get them and do it. I'm glad you mentioned I.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Used to do a bit about. I used to do
a bit about. There was a snowstorm when my grandfather
was being buried and the paul Bears couldn't make it.
They couldn't get to the funeral Paulish, so my brother
and I had to carry the casket by ourselves, and
we had to take the top off to fit it
through the door. And I would actually mind doing it.
So I don't know if that's what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Jurisdiction of a doa they add keep throwing nuggets in there.
Maybe it'll come to them, It'll come to them.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Maybe it's the other Joe Battlemente.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
They think, Ah, well, listen, you know we're talking. We're
talking about this Joe Battle Lamente like the podcast, this
episode three hundred and eighty seven. Yes, looking back on
his career in the NYPD and of course looking back
on all that he did in the comedy world as well.
So I may let's see here, because producer Victor just texted,
we do we have the set. There we go, we

(49:44):
have the little clipping of the set from nineteen ninety seven.
Let's see if you guys can hear this one Joe
Battlelamente Live the Carolines. Back at nineteen ninety.

Speaker 4 (49:50):
Seven, Doctor I did a movie.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
I got a residualle exchect for it for You Can't
See Ransom. I had had a really small part in
that movie. You know it said you don't see me
very much. I didn't really say anything, and I definitely
didn't know who's going on.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
It's kind of like the part of my dad put
in my parents' marriage.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
It's doing the part. Anybody I didn't see it, well,
if you didn't see it, it didn't take with you
right now too.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
So if you didn't see it, you get that ship
from your cousin Beato over in Brooklyn.

Speaker 3 (50:27):
I watch it like fifteen times.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
But I'm in the part of Gibson's minds that's in
the Central Park and he booking for the guys who
took his kid.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
And he runs by a payphone because the.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Guy on the payphone about sixty one with so hap
of hair, the only guy that guy's talking.

Speaker 4 (50:38):
To on the other end of the line.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
It's got to happen. I'm sure he was something about
that show We Are. Everybody watches that show We Are.
I watched it the first time the other day. I
don't get it.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Everyone says it's the most realistic show on television.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
And that whole hospital is not one Silipino nurse, no
Indian doctors like you said, right, those Jamaican nurses. I
don't know about you guys. When I go into the ard,
I don't have some beautiful nurse like Athaway come up
to me. He said, Oh, don't sit down right here,
we'll take there of you. Relax, we'll get a doctor
right away. Fish something to drink. I did some Dominican
guy who.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Didn't graduate from high school yet, who's like an orderly
like Nona.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Let me tell you something right now, I think you
got shot in that head. You bleed him all the
nut baby.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Okay, this is a true no true white to a
car the colony mont pad.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
And what about George Poney, that's say Georgia Tony ladies man.
He's been in the hospital almost four years now, but
then someone would have fixed fixed.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
His neck by now.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
Maybe the scripts on the floor.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
You know, he's like one of those dolls in back
of the Puerto Rican guy's car and weapon.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
There you go a little bit of a two and
a half minuteliff there.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
I was counting how many times I'll be canceled now.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
But listen, yeah there I'm thinking, not that I'm offended
by the Indian doctor Jamaican nurse Philip, but you know
what again, I and this is the thing with comedy,
and I found this with just roasting my friends, right
and you know this, I mean the chop breaking that
goes down the emergency response field. If you're making fun
of everybody equally, you can never go wrong. If everyone yeah,

(52:42):
I mean, at least that's the way it should be. Still,
but it's you know, exactly, as producer Victor's putting the
chat it's good. It's all good as long as everyone's
getting roasted. If you're focusing in on one group, then okay,
you're treading a very very thin line. Unless it's your
own group. Then if you're making fun of yourself, that's
a little bit different. But I mean, listen, is if
you're roasting everybody equally, then nobody should get offended, you know.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
But that was mild roasting. I was just making fun
of the traeotypes. And that's New York City, right, That's.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Right, that's Connecticut. And I walk into a hospital now
to give a patient report when I just got doing
a call, there's a there's Asian nurse check, Jamaican nurse check,
some Spanish guy or girl who's just had enough of
the day and just wants to go home check, you know,
And then you know, soe he hit all the things
right there. That was ninety seven, almost thirty years later,

(53:25):
and you're still just as accurate now as you were then.
It adds no one wanted to do the doa PaperWorks.
The cops allegedly kept moving the body across the precinct lines.
The most live dead body ever.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Okay, that's not something I wrote. This is a story
I heard when I was a rookie cop in Central Park. So, Mike,
you know that the holiday integrity program. Right around the holiday,
they'll they can stop, well, they can do it anytime
they want, but it becomes a bigger thing. At least
it was back in the day. They'll stop a police
car and the captain or a lieutenant will want to
look in the trunk, make sure you're not shopping on

(53:56):
duty and trying to take advantage of, you know, getting
discounts and you like. That. Actually happens in New York City,
but it must happen some pastons, but not Manhattan. So
I'm going to go to Bloomingdale's and get one on
the arm because I'm in uniform. So the story was
that these cops were sitting up in the Sector EDDY
in Central Park up on the hill and they saw
a car come in from the two eight or three

(54:16):
to two, and they did something in the woods, and
then they heard come over the radio Ada in the park,
so they took a ride down and they saw it
inside the wall. Those cops had taken. Again. This is
all allegedly. I don't have any facts to prove any
of this. It's a story and they there was a
dead homeless guy, frozen guy, and the poor guy they
just put him in so the cops in the park

(54:38):
not to be undone. They took the body back into
Harlem and then back and forth, back and forth, and
then finally the park cops got stopped by the duty
captain and the dude captain wants to look in the
trunk Holiday Integrity program. And the story goes, they wouldn't
open the trunk, so he took the keys and he
opened the trunk, saw it, closed the trunk and said
Merry Christmas, guys, have a good one, and left and

(55:00):
then retired shortly thereafter. That's the story, folks. But I
did not write that story. That was told to me
when I was twenty one or twenty two years old.
Geez so, and you know what, in the seventies, I
could believe it might have happened, who knows. That was
nineteen eighty six, eighty seven when I heard the story.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
It was a wow. While West back then, yes, city
was going city was going through financial crisis. People were
getting laid off, including cops, including firemen. Some of these
guys you know, had to go be bus drivers for
a couple of years before they could come back. Everything,
all bets were off, anything went back that it was
no holds barred. It was no holds barred. You know.
So around this time, you know, twenty and one, nine

(55:37):
to eleven happens, and I will say, balancing it as
a policeman and also a comedian, people wanted to laugh
again right afterwards. I mean, you even remember the line
Giuliani and is with Commissioner von Ess and he was
fire commission at the time, Commissioner Bertie Carrey, who we
just lost a few months back, and you know, behind
them as much of New York City police officers and firefighters,

(55:58):
and I'm paraphrasing along the lines they say, Okay, you know,
we should start laughing again. And I think Giuliani or
characters to Giuliani's like right now, you know, so in
terms of and I'll get to your experience as a
policeman down there in a moment, but just in terms
of as a performer, tell me about your material the
days afterwards, when people were sober and there was a
line to walk of just again sombern is, yes, but

(56:18):
trying to get people to laugh again. Levity at a
sad time.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
Yeah, I didn't by by then. Like I said, I
did stand up from roughly ninety one to two thousand
and one. I did a couple of shows, but not
enough to really have any stories about how it changed
in there. What you were just referring to was SNL, right,
the first eleven? Yet, can we be funny? And Julianni said,
why start now? Right? Yep?

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Bingo, Yep, that's what Yeah, that's what.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
It was, the producer of SNL. So what I do remember, though,
was how important humor was down there, like keeping people,
you know, keeping people the cops. And you know, I
had sixteen years on at the time, and I've run
into people subsequent years and years later saying how important

(57:06):
it was that we were still trying to keep ourselves laughing.
Not on the pile. I'm not talking about on the pile.
I'm talking about, you know, doing security in the neighborhood,
in the neighborhood. And that's something I've always tried to
teach both my daughters is that humor is one of
the most important tools you can have in your quiver,
you know, and your arrows, because in any situation, if
you can try to find something humorous in it. Not

(57:28):
always possible. Nine to eleven was one of the ones
that was very difficult, but still there were moments of levity,
especially in the subsequent weeks and months. Yeah, so I
can talk to it more from you know, boots on
the ground than actually in clubs, because I wasn't going
to clubs at that time. I was working twelve hour
shifts for a couple of months.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Right, So let's touch on that. You know, first, when
when you heard about what was going on, when were
you able to get down there? Did you ever get
down there on the day itself or in the days afterwards.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Yeah, I waited. I my mother in law called and
left a machine message. She was from Puerto Rico, so
she had an accent, and I wasn't sure what she
had said. It's only she said a train had hit
the World Trade Center. That's what I was hearing from
the other room. So immediately turned on the TV and
saw the hole in the north tower. So my daughters
were four and one at the time, and I started

(58:20):
making phone calls. I was off that day. I took
that day off and we almost my wife and I
almost went down to the American Indian museum because I
had just opened. We were going to take the girls
down there that morning, and for whatever reason, we went
to bed too late that night, and we said I
will do it another time, so we would have been
down there with the kids. So I waited till about
I guess i'd waited till about eleven o'clock because I

(58:42):
knew the traffic situation, and I shot down to the
precinct because you're supposed to respond to your command. And
I'll never forget I lived twenty two miles from the
Park precinct from my driveway, and I made it down
there in about eighteen and a half minutes because all
the traffic had been pulled off to GW and caught
up with a caravan a cops and fireman I'm guessing.

(59:02):
And we got to the gas station right before the bridge,
and they had a falance set up of state police, pilots,
ates Parkway police, maybe some of the local and they
had a little funnel going through and they were just
looking for everybody's idea as we went through. And I'll
never forget that myself and the police officer who I
asked for my ID, I don't even think he said anything,
I just set it out and ready to give it

(59:23):
to him. We didn't really change any words, and everybody
had shotguns. And when I hit the bridge, when I
hit Center Span, I looked to my right and I
could see the black smoke and Julianni was just being
spoken to, I think for the first time by a reporter,
and he was crying. Giuliani was crying, and I'm like,
if this guy's crying, and I'm seeing what am I doing?

(59:43):
Like why am I doing this? And I just autopilot
right down to the command and then got dressed, and
then we waited until close to midnight, and then they
took us down there by city buses and posted us
all over and I was with ten cops from Park
on First Avenue and I guess it was Houston Street.
That's where they had us posted, not letting any vehicles

(01:00:04):
go south. And we were there overnight and first we
went to peck Slip. They took us to peck Slip,
and then we responded to return roll call to peck
Slip and then we were dismissed. And then I came
back the next day or the day after.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
Yeah, it's crazy, you know, some of them yeah, I
can't speak today. Some of the commands affected. We're nearby
the sixth Precinct which lost Detective Claude Richards from the
bomb squad. Jimmy Lee who was a patrol cop at
the sixth Precinct, you know he had the thirteenth O'Brian
McDonald from ESU, Morris Smith, and Bobby Fazzio. A lot
of these commands weren't that far away. Those twenty three
cops that got killed, or many of the poor to

(01:00:37):
thorty cops are firement. Specifically the twenty three NYPD cops.
Did you know them at all? And passing as friends?

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
There was enough. There's an SU cop that used to
hang out around the park. I know he was from
Pearl River, John Daleira yep. I used to see him
in the park priestinct a lot. They would come there
for gas, I guess, and John Perry and I were friends.
Tom Perry was a cop in the park and then
he was resigned in that day because something about an
unregistered gun on a movie set. Because John did extra

(01:01:05):
work on films.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
He's gonna go to be a medical malpractice attorney too.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Oh is that what he was? I know he was
an attorney and one day I called him JFK Jr.
And he looked at me. He goes, why did you
call me that. I go, didn't you go to Uh?
Didn't you go to New York Law? New York? And
I think NYU Law School. I think that's where they went.
And he goes, well, I know I know John. He
was in my class. And then one day I'm riding
my scooter down by Tavern on the Green and I
looked to my left or right and it's JFK. Junior

(01:01:30):
on a bicycle and I said hey. He goes, hey,
what's up? And I go, uh, do you know John Perry?
He goes, yeah, I was in law school with a
John Perry. I go, he's a cop in this precinct now,
and he goes, he cursed, get the f out of here.
And I went and I went, no, really, And it
was just wild. It was just totally wild. He said
give me a call because I thought John was maybe exaggerating.

(01:01:51):
John Perry was exaggerating, and he is in the movie
Devil's Advocate. He did a lot of extra work. And
if you watch the movie Devil's Advocate, there's a c
where Satan's about to take a guy out, and the
guy's crossing Central Park West to come into the park
to run on the reservoir, and that's where it happens.
But he crosses John, and John's on screen for like
five seconds walking across. So great guy and a great runner.

(01:02:14):
Two sad brat marathons all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
John was an NYPD Blue as an extra too, as
a police officer, ironically standing at attention at a funeral.
And I always get chills telling you the story because
in that scene there's an officer who was singing Ave
Maria at a Catholic service for a fallen officer. That
same officer would sing that same song at John's memorial service.
And to give you a glimpse for those in the

(01:02:39):
audience that don't know the story, as soon as you
said pro River, I'm like, yeah, because I know Officer
Delari's family very well. His widow and I are friends.
So as soon as he said that, I knew who
you were talking about. John was in truck to ESU
and responded down there that day. But John Perry was
a lawyer, spoke about six different languages. I believe you know,
very smart man who had a learning disability, leave it.

(01:03:00):
He battled ayslexia, which.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
He wanted to prove them wrong. That's why he learned. Yeah,
one of the last times I saw him, he was
he had a textbook with him. I forget where it was,
but he had a textbook and he was studying Japanese
I think. So he was never stopped learning.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
No, and he he spoke up a lot for abused
children as well. That was something he was very passionate.
And yeah, he did go to law school. So that
morning you said, John had about eight nine years in
the job. He worked in the four to zero and
he was getting ready to retire to go be a lawyer. Officially,
he heard what was going on, took his badge back
from the from the desk, went down there and in
an NYPD polo and his badge around his neck tie

(01:03:38):
belief hooked up with one of his captains, and he
was last seen a sporting woman over broken glass out
of the South Tower lobby. You know, So he that
if there's ever an example of guts, it would have
been easy for him to say, this doesn't apply to
me anymore. I'm retired. Right back down there, he squeezed,
he was only forty years old when he left us,

(01:03:59):
but he squeez a lot of life untilose forty years.
So I'm glad you mentioned him because he really was
a modern day renaissance man. And then Commissioner Krick, I
read this line from Karric in this when he spoke
at his memorial service, and I thought I had nine lives,
Kerk said John add about twenty. Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah,
thank you for speaking on him. So, I mean, you know,
in terms of curriculum development, just to get back to

(01:04:21):
your career, that is something you had a bit of
a hand in towards the end before you retired in
O five and you played and Mark DeMeo did this too,
so I guess this is one of the places you
know him from as well. The suicidal cop. You see
a lot of this nowadays, where mos are drained. If
you're working in this type of field, we talked about
it earlier, you're gonna see some messed up stuff. It
adds up, and it's hard to seek help when you're
the one that's tasked usually with helping people. And we're

(01:04:42):
trying really hard to smash that stigma now so we
don't keep losing guys but it happens, and ESU is
gonna respond in any instance if it unfortunately, if the
act has already taken place, or in the scenario where
it hasn't taken place yet and you have a chance
to talk this person out of it. So tell me
about playing that role in the depths you had to
tap into to really make it as realistic for these

(01:05:04):
guys as possible.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
Well, it was the ESU graduation. I believe it was
their last class before they were going to be going
on to their graduation. And Jimmy Shanahan, that's how Jimmy
and I knew each other for a few years. And
he had the flu and he called me and said, hey, brother,
can you possibly get down to John Jay College tomorrow.
You have to do it on your own time. I
think I had to do it on my own time.
And I showed up and the guy who had been

(01:05:26):
running the course told me what the situation was. I
was a barricaded, barricaded police officer who had just found
out that his girlfriends, his current girlfriend had stolen his
dead wife's jewelry to sell for drugs, to get drugs,
and I let a round go off in her apartment

(01:05:46):
and unbeknownst to anybody else, I had taken ten thousand
dollars out of the precinct nine to eleven fund. That's
what I was fed as the actor by the guy.
That's all the information that he gave me. And then
they said action. And I had just finished studying what's
called the Meisman technique with Joanna Beckson. She was a
well known acting teacherman Attan and I had just been
doing my one man show in ninety nine in two

(01:06:09):
thousand and one, so I was primed for it. And
I was able to just get to a point where
I broke down crying, and ESU came and knocked on
the door. And the first thing I said, they said,
I said, who is it? They said, Esu. I go,
I don't want to talk to any cops whose fathers
are chiefs. I want a real cop. And it got
such a big laugh from the audience. And then the
ESU guy, the guy who had been running the class,

(01:06:31):
I can't remember his name, he said, you don't really
believe that, do you. You don't really believe your father.
You have to have a father's a chief to be
in the su I to listen you and I both know.
So this was November of two thousand and three, no
October November. I said, you and I both know. Before
nine to eleven you might not have been a chief,
but you had to have a crane to get an
interview with the SU But after nine to eleven, of

(01:06:51):
course they opened. They needed a lot more.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
People to lost fourteen guys.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Well that too, yeah, absolutely, but they also I think
they doubled the size of the unit or something. So
I'm actually it's funny, not funny that you say that,
but I can only tease it right now. But Nipovarr
and I are working on a memoir of sorts. To him.
Nick is a retired I know you know who he is,
but for the audience, retired lieutenant Emergency Services Unit lieutenant

(01:07:18):
who I met in the banking world when I retired
from the job. We know each other for twenty years
now and we're working on a book together with his stories,
exploits and stories. So it should be something to look
forward to. You'd have a spoke on in about a year.

Speaker 1 (01:07:34):
Sounds good. I was gonna say that, you know, I
was gonna wait until we got off air, but I'm
glad you mentioned. Yeah, because now I should say, because
Nick is in the chat watching the night via LinkedIn,
So how do you Nick? And absolutely yeah, when you
once that book is out to Nick and to yourself,
I'm more than welcome to come back on and I'll
be more than glad to promoted because Nick's got a
lot of stories even preceding the Emergency Service, let alone
in the times of course he spent ended up until

(01:07:55):
he retired as a lieutenant. So you know, again, you're
right about beating a great You did need a hook,
and a lot of guys that I've had on for
my ESU mini series have mentioned not all of them,
but a good chunk of them is saying, yeah, they
didn't need a hook to get into that unit. And
you know, again, it's a tough unit to get into.
It's arguably there's a lot of great assignments in the
NYPD the unit to get into. You know, I think

(01:08:15):
the only unit that's tougher is the bomb squad, you know,
and that makes sense given the qualifications you need for
a unit like that. So that brings us into you
know too. How well, actually, before I get to your retirement,
how long were you quote unquote the suicidal cop for
these acting demonstrations.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
It was just that one time I filled in for
Jimmy Yeah, and I met and I met Jennifer Hunt,
who had just become a civilian employee at the Police Academy.
She came up to me and she said, I'd love
to come see you. Where can I see you? Thinking
I was I like to think I was an actor,
but she thought I was doing Broadway stuff. So she

(01:08:52):
wanted to come see me at a player or something,
and I said, you can come see me in Central Park.
I'm on every day at seven am. And she was
secure cop. Oh yeah, And so she brought me down
to the Police Academy and it was it was weird
because it didn't end up being what I thought it
was going to be. I was part of the executive
development section and I was able to Brinda, lieutenant friend,
down to work there, and then she left and she

(01:09:14):
left us on our own. But we got to create
some content. You got to create some classes from scratch
for the executive cores, which was was a lot of fun.
But it did teach me a lot about computers. It
taught me a lot about Microsoft Office Suite, which was
very helpful. When I landed in the bank world a
year later, it was just weird. It was like when
you look back on your life sometimes it falls out

(01:09:35):
like a novel. And I knew how to use spreadsheets.
Word I had rudimentary at least with all of it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
Spreadsheets. I hate that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
I don't like that. I hate them. I don't even
like the word.

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
But yeah, everybody who knows me knows how much I
hate spredsheets. So thankfully let's again, as I joke, it's
why I want to be a big dumb fireman, because
I don't have to do spreadsheets. Shout out to anybody
who works in that field, that any sort of corporate
field where you had to with numbers involved more times
off than not, you're going to have to.

Speaker 2 (01:10:00):
Yeah, not as scary as they look at when you
get in there. And I only have like a t
understanding they've can do a lot as scary as they look.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
Okay, well, good to know, good to know in a
small world. With the ry mentions. I worked with Nick
Bavaro and Street Crime a lot of guys man because sheree.
I don't want to say street Crime was a stepping stone,
because you can make a career in street Crime, but
a lot of guys who ended up in emergency service
because it was also under the SOD banner started out
in SCU so that was. Yeah, there are a few
guys who made that jump over the course of their
careers because it was under SOD at the time before

(01:10:31):
street crime got done away with by Ray Kelly during
his second stint in two thousand and two, Jennifer Hunt
wrote one of my favorite books, I Believe Seven Shots,
which discusses the nineteen ninety seven terrorist raid that the
bomb squad and the su did on the two guys
who were going to blow up the Atlantic Avenue subway.
That book came out in twenty ten, So I'd love
to get her on the show, especially considering the.

Speaker 2 (01:10:50):
Factively she passed a few years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
Oh she did pass away, dang.

Speaker 2 (01:10:55):
Yeah. And I sat in on a lot of the
interviews for that book. Really, yeah. I learned a lot
from her. I learned a lot about writing. Yeah. It
was very interesting how she conducted the interviews and she
got sergeant's captains, inspectors to talk openly, and I was
sitting there helping her technology. It wasn't meant to be

(01:11:15):
for a book. At that time, but eventually ended up
being that way.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
It's a great book and it helped me formed a
lot of friendships out of it, So.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
Yeah, yeah, it was she mentions me in the in
the acknowledgements, it was very nice.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
Yeah, And I remember reading that and it hits differently
now because one of the guys she interviewed was my
good buddy Richie Tiemsma, and Richie just you know, he
died last year nine to eleven cancer, but he was
one of the guys involved in that as a detective
in the bomb squad at the time. He was also
a former ESU cop in his own right. So reading
that book, that was a job I didn't even know happened.
But afterwards, I ended up having Paul Yurku on the show,

(01:11:48):
ended up having Richie on the show both multiple times,
kind of looking back on their careers and that job,
which a lot of people forget about because it's sandwich
quite literally, a smack dab in the middle, four years
after nineteen ninety three, four years before nine to eleven,
But that was one hell of a job and she
did a great job chronically yet and I'm sad she's
not with us anymore. Yeah, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
Yeah, great lady.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely contributed a lot towards the NYPD and
contributed a lot with that book, certainly. So five. I
mean certain guys I go back to Mark to Mayo
because what the he title his one man show twenty
and out. A lot of guys as they get towards
the end kind of have that feeling. Not all, but
some guys. I mean it's a family thing. Some guys
the pension looks really good and they'll just take it
while they're ahead, and some guys just have other things

(01:12:31):
they want to tackle. For you, your kids were still
pretty young at the time. Yeah, you were having a
good time. Central Park's a great beat. Like we talked about,
what was it that made you say, Okay, you know
what this was a good run of time ago.

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
Well, I was. I was in the academy for that
last eighteen months to twenty months, and I actually worked
for Chief Pulaski and Sim's training. I got a signed
to help him out with the classes for SIMS and
he actually asked me he found out they're a friend,
that I might be interested to go to work at
the terrorism unit. And then something just hit me. I said,

(01:13:03):
you know what, I just want to get out, and
I got out, and luckily I landed in the financial
crimes investigation world, where which I never loved, but it
paid very very well, and it made me a much
better writer because the constant writing of reports. It was
like you were writing a forty nine or two every day.
That's basically what it was. The banking world, the transaction monitoring,

(01:13:27):
trying to trying to find, you know, why the wires
are bouncing from country to country when it doesn't make
any sense to do that, and then writing up everything
you found in your investigation in a way where a
civilian could pick it up and read it and understand
what you're talking about. So you learn to get rid
of the fat very quickly. And it seeped into my
fiction writing. I noticed that I was changing the way

(01:13:51):
I was writing just generally. But in twenty eleven I
wrote a short story, a fiction short story for the
American Chemical Club Gazette. They had a con test and
I actually won the contest, and then I won an
award from the Dog Writers' Association of America that year.
And when a woman told me on the phone, I said, wow,
she goes, yeah, they're the biggest one, and I said,

(01:14:11):
there's more than one. There's more than one Dog Writers' Association.
So it's just interesting how life unfolds. Because if I
hadn't gone to work in the academy, I wouldn't have
been as prepared. Not that it wouldn't. I still could
have figured it out, but it just helped ease me
into the bank world once I got there. And then
having to write these reports over and over again just

(01:14:33):
change something. And I'm also a voracious reader. I love
to read, so those two. Stephen King always says. People
come up to him, I want to be a writer,
and he says, what do you like to read? They go,
I don't really read. You're not going to be a
writer if you don't read. And that's what I tell everybody.
You got to read a lot to write. Well. You know,
I'm not saying I write well. I'm just saying you
have to do it in order to write in an

(01:14:54):
understandable manner. Let's put it that way.

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
Oh, it's a great education for sure. And that was
that was the thing that I think you don't into.
I dove into and writing I know, for both of
us is a sense of Catharsis, you know. And the
nice thing with writing is that you can kind of
there's no rules on it. You can write about just
about anything under the sun. You know, all bets are
relatively off. It's a free for all. And I often
make the joke, you know, podcasting is my wife, but

(01:15:18):
writing is my mistress, you know, because when I'm on
breaks from here, I'll balance both. I'll go in and
I'll bang out a column from time to time for you.
With Police one, twenty years worth of experience in the
greatest police department in the world. You know, it's not
always easy. You would think on paper, okay, yeah, write
about anything under the sun. But there's so much to
pluck from those twenty years it's hard to pick. And

(01:15:38):
in addition, to weigh in on matters of current current
events in terms of the law enforcement world from your
vantage point of experience, difficult balancing act. But what do
you most enjoy about Police one? And just tell me
about the mixture of columns in terms of subject matter
you're able to mix in.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
So it came about because I self published a novel
about Elvis. I wrote that he had faked his death
in order to get off the drugs and get away
from the theme. And I have a lot of friends
from the stand up world. With one of my friends
that head writer for Jimmy Kimmel. Another friend is a
big producer of shows on Nickelodeon, So I sent it
around to those guys, and Scott Fellows, the producer of Nickelodeon,

(01:16:18):
said to me, look, don't waste time trying to get
this book published. Just self publish it because the eldest
movie was about to come out, and so do you
want to take advantage of that publicity. So that's just
how the Police One came about. The woman who the
editor Nancy. It doesn't matter, but Nancy for Police One.
She reached out to me, and I was at a

(01:16:39):
bar with my wife waiting for a gallery to open
in the village because my wife's a painter and she
had a painting in this show in Greenwich Village. So
we were waiting and I get an email and she says,
I'd like you to write from us. I read your
short story. She hadn't read the book, but she read
the short story The Canine Dog on nine to eleven
story and me some ideas. So I have to thank

(01:17:02):
George Clooney, because I was sipping his tatila and the
idea came to me. I must have thought about it
in the past. The title standing a Count, which was
also the name of my friends one man show. His
show was standing eight, but the column was standing a count.
I said, I'm going to write stories about cops who
you know, true stories that were able to get through

(01:17:23):
all different kinds of problems alcoholism, bad shootings, cancer, whatever
you can think of, and I'll just show clearly how
the great referee in this guy gave them a standing
a count to go on and fight again. And that's
what I started doing. And I did that for about
eighteen months. And I also have done one offs for her,

(01:17:44):
like every year, I'll do a nine to eleven story.
I just interviewed the novelist Stephen Pressfield. You might know
his name from. His most famous work is probably The
Legend of bager Vans. It's turned into a movie.

Speaker 1 (01:17:57):
With me Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
I wrote a book called Gates of Fire, which is
a historical fiction about the battle at Thermopylai the Spartans
against the Persians that was made into the movie Three hundred.
Mister Pressfield's book is not the book that three hundred
was based on, and actually it was George Cloone who
optioned his book, but it was never made into a film.
And so that's my next article. It should have already dropped,

(01:18:23):
but probably won't drop until the end of this week.
It's just an interview with Stephen Pressfield. And it was
such an honor and a thrill to interview an author
that I've looked up to who's been a mentor to
me since the beginning, since I first met him. I
reached out after I read Gates of Fire when I
was working at the Police Academy to try to get
him to come speak at the NYP the Academy, and

(01:18:44):
he said, thank you very much, I'd be honored to
do that, but I don't like to fly, so if
we could set it up where if I'm going to
be flying, and I said, well, we can't really do
that because the scheduling. But I never lost touch with
him and a very nice man. I got to eat
breakfast with him in la in twenty ten and that
was a thriller and a half. It was akin to
meeting George Carlin because even though Carlin is my favorite comic.

(01:19:05):
Mister Pressfield is one of my favorite writers. If check
out his books, a lot of great historical fiction on
the Greek, the Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars. He has a
book called A Man at Arms about a guide during
the time of Jesus, a Roman soldier. Just a very
interesting e collective typewriter.

Speaker 1 (01:19:25):
So I'll ask you, because looking behind you, your bookshelf
is very vast when you're not reading things pertaining to
maybe necessarily police matters, and of course over the course
of your career, influencing what you're writing now. Type of
genre do you like to sit down and read besides
mister Pressfield, type of authors do you like to sit
down and read?

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
So Stephen King has always been a big influence. I
may I love his work, but over time you taste change.
And my favorite writer I would say of all time
is Cormack McCarthy The Road, No Country for Old Men.
Just something about his style that I love. Is it
challenge because he doesn't use quotation marks? Yes, so you

(01:20:04):
have to kind of go back sometimes. He said that,
and that drops some people insane. But I just love
his style so much that I've read everything he's ever written,
going way back to the early sixties.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
So it's funny because I grew up a huge I
was a big pro wrestling fan for a time, and
I didn't understand No Country for Old Men until watching
For those of you that watched growing up too, a
character wrestler by the name of christ Jericho, So Chris
Jericho is known as being kind of an eccentric character.
And he comes back in two thousand and eight and
he turns heel, which, for you know, those who not

(01:20:36):
familiar wrestling parlance, he became a bad guy. He later
says he based his character off of Javier Bardem's character
and No Country for Old Men, and it was great
character work. It was very well received, you know, by
those that understood obviously what really goes on behind pro wrestling,
and the fact that he was playing one. And he said, yeah,
the inspiration he trewe was from Bardem's character No Country

(01:20:57):
for Old Man. That's amazing, Sugar an honest man.

Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
A great movie.

Speaker 1 (01:21:03):
Great movie. That gas station scene is like with the
coin flip, is one of the most intense scenes of
cinematic history.

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
Got and one of the rare occasions because I'm a
huge movie fan too. Where the movie out did the book, I.

Speaker 1 (01:21:14):
Believe yeah, no, mm hm, And that's saying something.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
Awesome doesn't happen often, but it did in those instances,
of course. So just kind of before I get to
the Rabbid fire, looking back twenty years, very good career,
very unique and eclectic career in terms of you were
in one place for most of it, but you got
to do a lot within that one place. You certainly
weren't confined. It was an enjoyable time for you. I mean,
every job has its pressures and frustrations. No police agency
is perfect. But there was a lot more good than bad.

(01:21:43):
So when you look back, how do you define it?
Like I always like to ask my guests, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
I said it earlier, like, you know, the park is
the park, but I use the park for all the
great things about it. I was able to do so
many different details within it. I got to meet a
lot of great people, and I'm still close with most
of the people I worked with that I was friends with.
You're not friends with everybody, right, your coworkers, but the
people I was friends with, I'm still in touch with

(01:22:10):
and still get together from time to time. And one
of my best friends. I worked with him even in
the bank world. My original partner is the one who
got me into the bank world, Brian Hagerty. I worked
with him in a few different places over the last
twenty years. Mike Jacopi is another one. So yeah, I
got from the park all the potential that's there to

(01:22:31):
get from it. That's what I would say. It was
a wonderful place. I still love going there. Not the
precinct itself. That's a weird experience because you know, as
you know, it's a new building. The locker room, the
locker room I changed in for about seventeen years no
longer exists. The entire floor is gone, but just generally
the park itself. As a kid, my mom used to
take us to the park a lot, would get on

(01:22:53):
the subway from Queens and come in. She loved it,
so she passed that love on to me. You know,
I really enjoy Manhattan in general, love being the mattin.
I know. I know all the I know all the
bad things about it, all the evil, the horrible people say,
the crowds that I always say, if it wasn't for
the weather, the taxes, the crowds, the rudeness, the traffic,
New York would be a really nice place to live.

(01:23:14):
But I I just love it. I just love that
it quiets the voices down in my head when I'm
there because it's so loud and so and I love
all the different people from all over the world and
people stopping you asking you for directions. When I was
a cop and even as a civilian now, I just
love it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:29):
There's a line too from Mark Twain, new York would
be a real nice place if they ever finish it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
Oh that is a great line.

Speaker 5 (01:23:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23:35):
Yes, And I think there's Williams who said there's only
three cities in the United States worth visiting New York,
New Orleans, and San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (01:23:43):
Well he's not wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
I agree. I mean I do. All the cities are great.

Speaker 1 (01:23:48):
We're not knocking Los Angeles or no knocking Dallas for example,
where Chicago.

Speaker 2 (01:23:52):
Don't get that Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
But that last yes, I can't. I mean, listen, people
want to come to New Haven these stations for the pizza.
But I'm not ready to throw us in the conversation
just yet. But I do appreciate people wanting to come
down and try the best pisa in the country for
that matter, and that there you go, so you know,
so you know. So we'll get to the rabid fire now.
But before we do that, of course, a word from

(01:24:14):
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(01:25:01):
Don't forget about their giveaway going on through December twenty fourth.
And before I start my question for the Rabbit Fire
I think this is Nick Bavaro and he's saying, Mike,
imagine sitting across from Joe for years while toiling away
at the bank cap in the exact level of conversation
you're having now, deep at times, hysterical at other times.

Speaker 2 (01:25:15):
No, that was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):
A lot of fun, of course, and you gotta have
fun at work. It's important to keep things interesting so
that brings us into the rapid fire. As you know.
I don't got to explain it to you. You're that
was a nice thing about the rundown. It's nice when
someone's familiar with the program, which you are. Five hit
run questions for me, five hit and run answers from
you after a long day on the beat, you know,
or even sometimes just stopping in for a meal. Favorite
restaurant to go to.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
I'm going to say car Mines because I know it's
a lot of heating people, but my father cooked that
way a lot of garlic, and it's always going to be.
It's consistent, and it's just a lot of memories going
back to early nineteen ninety one. Two is the first
time I ate there.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
Yeah, that's a classic choice right there. I haven't heard
Carmine and ten in this program in a bit, so
I'm glad.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
You're west side the original location.

Speaker 1 (01:26:00):
There you go. Second question of Rapid Fire a favorite
cops show or movie? I mean, you mentioned some earlier,
but what do you feel is the most realistic one?
The ones that came along later.

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
I've talked to Nick about Bonnie Miller was the most
realistic in terms of the attitudes, the humor. Forget about
all the other stuff the realism, but that the humor
and the attitudes of the cops and Bonnie Miller, to me,
that was the best one.

Speaker 1 (01:26:26):
Yeah, that's a classic choice too, because a lot of
guys of a certain age do mention that show. And
for me, I mean original nineties Law and Daughter. I
mean now Law Dorter is just so corny. Hill Street
Blues is another good one. Joe Maliga Lawn Daughter. The
writing is terrible. Nineties Law and Daughter with Jerry Orbach,
you know, as Detective Lenny Briscoe. And I don't care
if his partner's Mike Logan, Ray Curtis or Ed Green.
If Lenny's in it, I'm watching. That was great. That

(01:26:49):
was pretty good and realistic. Homicide Life on the Street
was another very good show in its own right set
in Baltimore. Third Watch, even though it blended police and fire.
I liked Third Watch. I thought Third Watch was pretty good.
So those are right now.

Speaker 2 (01:27:00):
For movies, I would say FORDA Patchu the Bronx.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):
Yep, FORDA PATCHU was another one.

Speaker 2 (01:27:05):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
Billy Ryan had just mentioned homicide Life on the Street,
the most realistic portrayal of the detective squad besides Barney Miller.
Third funniest or most unforgettable moment on the.

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):
Beat unforgettable moment probably was Robert Chambers. That was the
the It was very early on did you did you?
Regardless of good bad, right, just the biggest thing that happened.

Speaker 1 (01:27:28):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):
Yeah, I would say that was because I was so
young and all of a sudden being homicide suspect that
was national international news. That was That was pretty big.

Speaker 1 (01:27:38):
Absolutely. And Hi to Mike Chenette working in EMS in
his own right in the former NYPD officer zone right.
Meant to shut you out earlier, Buddy. Good to see
in the chat. My friend, what's a really uplifting experience
from your career? Fourth question?

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
Uh, uplifting experience in my career? There were a lot.
There were a lot of them, so I was very lucky,
I would say, being being friendly with Stephen McDonald's being
run Stevens as I was. Yeah, it was always an inspiration.

Speaker 1 (01:28:03):
Yeah, that he certainly was, like we talked about early
and I'm glad we were able to speak on him.
And the last question of the rapid fire, you know,
I usually tailor it to those who are coming on
the job, but I'll ask you, I'll kind of switch
up the question a little bit. If there's guys out
there that are thinking about putting their papers and moving on,
what advice would you give for the cops that are considering,
you know, calling it a career and trying to move

(01:28:23):
on to that second.

Speaker 2 (01:28:24):
Act of any kind of any kind. Yeah, first of all,
I would tell him not to be in a hurry.
I was only forty years old and I worked out
for me. But if I tell I do this anyway,
I stopped and talked to cops in the city all
the time, and I say, unless you have something really
lined up that you really want to do, don't be
in such a hurry, because if you're only forty to

(01:28:44):
forty five to fifty even you know, unless it's really
just can't take it anymore, just kind of hang out.
But if you're not, just make sure you're prepared. Have
a degree. If you don't have your degree, work on it,
get it. If you have a degree, maybe get a
master's degree. You know, knowledge is power. Right to be
prepared and also be prepared for leaving something that is

(01:29:05):
a family. It's a family, even if it's a dysfunctional family,
it's a family and stepping outside of it. I remember
the anxiety I felt of what am I going to do?
How much I didn't know about the financial crimes world
yet I wasn't sure that was going to happen. So
that would be my advice is just be prepared and
make sure you're ready to make that move because it's
still You're young.

Speaker 1 (01:29:27):
Absolutely, and that's the thing you can get on the job.
At twenty twenty one years old, you retire, you know
in theory and you're yeah, you're only forty years old.
There's still another second career for you to have unless
your family's loaded. You got to do something else for
another fifteen to twenty years potentially before you could really
call it today and just enjoy the rest of your life.
So you know, well, actually you know what an additional

(01:29:48):
question from your younger daughter. Favorite dish at car Mines Fancasty.

Speaker 2 (01:29:53):
He likes to put me on the spot. Oh, there's
a lot, but the country style with the tony I
believe it's sausage Ackley onions with the rib of TONI
I would say that number.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03):
One can't go wrong with that. Thank you Data for
the late entry. I appreciate it. So that concludes stick around,
we'll talk off air. But before I say goodbye to
the audience, if you have any shout outs to floorish yours,
if you have anybody you want to shout out personally
job oh.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
That I want to shout out too. Oh, always to
my wife Sue, and my daughter's Kiara and Dana and
their fiance and boyfriend respectively, Cooper and you know, just
great kids. I'm very lucky all around. And I also
want to say with my wife we're working on a
children's booth together that was inspired at Ground zero called
God's Favorite Sound. So look look to that. I'll come

(01:30:37):
back on if you'd like when I have that outfindly,
but that's kind to mention earlier.

Speaker 1 (01:30:41):
You're welcome back. Anytime, and you're definitely welcome back when
you and complete that book for sure, So any other
projects you want to promote, by all means you're more
than welcome. Go right ahead where we can say.

Speaker 2 (01:30:49):
Nick and to Jimmy Shanahan, very pivotal in my life,
both of them, and just thank you to those both
those guys and Jim. We'll be watching this eventually, Jim Wallak,
so thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (01:31:00):
Shout out to Jim. And of course, as far as
hostage negotiation is concerned, I can't think of a better
guy for that than Jimmy Shanahan. There's ever somebody who
fit that unit. Jack Cambria, yes, I've been blessed to
have on this program as well. And Jimmy two who
was on this program a while ago, as I mentioned earlier.
So shout out to all of those guys. Coming up
next to the Mike Andwaven podcast. No show for the
rest of this week, of course, we'll be off, but

(01:31:20):
next Monday will be Bob Presler, former New York City firefighter,
currently a chief down at Christiana, Delaware. So that'll be
the best of the bravest. Another volume of that volume
eighty of that mini series, and let's see who we have.

Speaker 2 (01:31:33):
Real quick. But one last shot. My nephew, Brandon Battle Lamente,
was just promoted to sergeant in Suffolk County. I think
I mentioned him earlier, but I can't remember now. All fair,
good job, it was allf air brand gradual.

Speaker 1 (01:31:45):
Gratulations, gradulations on the promotion. Glad you could mention that
on here. Keep doing what you're doing, Brandon, Thank you
very much for what you're doing out there. And next Friday,
of course, will be Ray Flood, former member the NYPD
Emergency Service Unit. He'll be here from the volume of
the e Men. For those of you, of course, who
are going to be indulging this week, just be careful,
please make good choices. And if you're gonna drink, please

(01:32:05):
don't drive. So just don't kill each other. Be smart,
don't get yourselves gmmed up. Just again, be careful out
there during this particular time. Now, for those of you
listening on the audio side, it's the funniest song I've
ever heard, but the guitar work is just heavenly from
their nineteen eighty six album The Queen Is Dead. The
Smiths are gonna play us out tonight with some girls
are bigger than others. In the meantime, on behalf of

(01:32:25):
retired NYBD officer, writer and author Joe Battelmonte, I am
Mike Cologne, and of course I'll be half pictor two
in all of you in the audience. I'm Mike Cologne,
and we we'll see you next time. To care everyone,
to see you next week.

Speaker 6 (01:32:58):
The sas but one concern I have just discoedle. Some
girls are begive another. Some girls are begie in other
and some girls mothers a big of another.

Speaker 5 (01:33:15):
Girl the mother.

Speaker 6 (01:33:18):
Some girls are bigger another, Some girls are bigger than other.
Some girls mothers are making another girl the mother.

Speaker 1 (01:33:41):
O s to is such a club patrol, I say
I would.

Speaker 2 (01:33:45):
Do the creative al.

Speaker 5 (01:33:48):
H, I said.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
Some guys a.

Speaker 3 (01:33:51):
Bigger than other.

Speaker 5 (01:33:53):
Some girls I beg of than other.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (01:33:57):
Some guys mother a bigger than that bagget you mother.

Speaker 3 (01:34:02):
Some guys I'm big other th other.

Speaker 5 (01:34:05):
Some guys I'm big other Uh.

Speaker 6 (01:34:09):
Some guys my fas a big of another gathers.

Speaker 1 (01:34:13):
A mother.

Speaker 5 (01:34:31):
Nama not so jun My flee to the main

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